Increase Pageviews on Associated Content Using These Tips

You've written and web-published a great article on Associated Content, but what good will it do anyone if no one can find it?

Not only is it important to spend as much time (or more) promoting your articles as you do writing them, with the new bonus bucks contest on Associated Content - driven by pageviews - there's more incentive than ever before to increase the amount of fingers clicking your articles.

"Rest assured, if it is the type of piece that will attract pageviews, you will be paid accordingly," Associated Content's CEO, Luke Beatty, promised in an October 17, 2006 posting on the company blog, which touched on methods used to determine higher offers.

Gimme pageviews!
So how exactly do you build the number of eyes eyeballing your content?

In my article titled "New to Associated Content? Raise Your Clout Index!" I provided some basics tips to increase pageviews by using social bookmarking sites and such.

But since then I've learned a few additional tips that have helped drive more traffic to my Associated Content pieces, and again, I hope they do the same for you:

Give the People What They Want!
As I wrote in the New to Associated Content piece, I like to check Yahoo's Buzz Log for the most recent search terms that people are typing into search engines so that I know what people are looking for, not just what I want to write about.

Yes, it's good to cover subjects close to your heart or important political treatises, but the best kind of marketer checks consumers' desires and provides good information that satisfies their searchings.

One of my long-term editors told me that a good writer can write about any topic. Besides, readers might stumble across your more important topics whilst searching for puff pieces.

For example, on Friday, October 13, 2006, the Buzz Log posted an entry called "Will Brooke Hogan Be a Pop Star?" that included - which is extremely helpful - the actual search terms in quotes that Brooke's fans were typing into search engines. Two search terms, "fhm magazine brooke hogan" and "brooke hogan fhm" were specifically listed.

The Brooke Hogan frenzy tied right in with an idea that was forming initially in my brain as a blog posting about Scarlett Johansson on the November cover of Esquire, so I turned it into an AC article called Attack of the Lad (and Old Geezer) Mags and tagged the piece with all the tags listed therein, including the exact ones I gleaned from the Buzz Log.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Attack of the Lad (and Old Geezer) Mags make the top spot of the original Movers & Shakers list that AC posted on October 16, 2006, despite never having made it into the lovely glow of the content spotlight on AC's front page.

What's in a Name?
After that, I learned just how important it is to name our Associated Content pieces with more exact search terms to drive viewers to our content. SEO is the name of the game.

Again, trolling around on Yahoo's Buzz Log, I learned about a contestant named Toastee from the Flavor of Love reality show. I'd watched the show a few times before - it helps to have knowledge aforehand to cut down on tons of research time - but I'd never heard of Toastee.

After researching her backstory, I decided to write a piece called "Toastee Pics, Toastee Video" about the newsworthy skyrocketing increase in searches for - ah um - visuals of the young lady.

(I took me forever to realize that title of our AC articles drives the url name, e.g., North Korea Promises No More Nuclear tests has most of those words in the HTML page created for the piece, and this is important to search engines.)

I believe that originally naming the piece "Toastee Pics, Toastee Video" (which has since been changed to the more descriptive Flavor of Love's Toastee), helped catapult it not only to the top position in AC's Movers & Shakers list published on 10/20/06, but also to the number #1 position on Google when folks searched for the exact terms "Toastee Pics" and "Toastee Video".

Obey the Law of Supply and Demand
A day or two later, I found out about fresh-out-of-retirement rapper Jay-Z and his new video, "Show Me What You Got," which showcases a new Champagne that he called Gold Bottles of that Ace of Spades.

When Jay-Z breaks wind it's breaking news, so I knew bunches of poseurs would be in hot pursuit of all things Jay-Z. Miraculously, when I typed "Armand de Brignac" and "Gold Bottles of that Ace of Spades" into Google, I only found a few pages about the drink.

I posted a link that lead to my AC article as the 6th commenter on a site called www.timepieces.luxist.com and forgot about it. Lo and behold, AOL linked a cover article to the luxist site with my link in that prominent hot spot!

My blog traffic page with a link to the AC article (see below about blog entries) shot up during the time AOL rotated that cover article, and soon Gold Bottles of that Ace of Spades made it not only in AC's content spotlight, but also in the #1 spot on Google (which now has nearly 80,000 pages about the drink) and the #5 position on Yahoo search engines.

Spotting a not-yet-well-documented trend is a perfect opportunity to be one of the first to write about it, forcing others to easily find your work on the subject.

Use Your Blog to Drive Traffic to Your AC Articles
I hope you already have a blog. And if it's not on Blogger, I hope you're full of knowledge about your blog's site because Blogger.com is all I know right now.

If you haven't set up a blog yet, you might want to consider setting one up. At first I just used mine to as an easy way to show editors my published stuff, but since then I've learned the value of daily blogging about topical interests to drive more traffic to AC.

Blogging about your AC articles is one more effective avenue to open up that allows traffic to find you. And frequent blogging not only increases the blog's value, but you can use it as a conduit to drive traffic to your AC pieces with a photo and one- or two-sentence teaser to make readers want to read and click further.

Blogger.com is good because they are one of the sites that provide individual URLs for each blog entry posted. For example, on my blog at http://paulamooney.blogspot.com, I blogged about one of my AC articles called The Departed Box Office Take is Over 77 Million and Counting… with the accompanying URL being named:

http://paulamooney.blogspot.com/2006/10/departed-box-office-take-is-over-77.html

The more URLs created that ultimately point to your AC articles, the better. Another plus to having individually named URLs is that by using sites like Freestats.com, you can get a count of your blog pageviews, and with them an idea of which AC articles are getting more exposure than others because your blog post traffic is representative of your AC articles.

After updating your blog, don't forget to ping it on Google, Technorati, Pingoat, and similar sties like King Ping and Ping-o-Matic! so they'll know you have fresh content out there.

Title! Title! Title!
As discussed in a prior point, having clearly searchable terms in the URL is a plus. As of this writing, anyone who typed "The Departed" and "Box Office Take" in Yahoo would find that AC article listed it in the top search results position.

It helps to lose all that eloquent knowledge learned in your college creative writing class and title your pieces like a searcher. Think about the search terms you normally type into search boxes and work them into your title. For example, I knew most folks wouldn't know how to spell Armand de Brignac off the top of their American heads, so I titled that piece after the line they'd surely rehearsed in their hip-hop heads since they heard Jay-Z spit it.

And I made sure to use it not only in the tags at the social bookmarking sites, but also when I learned to…

Tag the Blog and Blog Posts
Technorati.com (a site that tracks and ranks 55 million blogs) not only has a cool "Top Searches" feature that's updated pretty regularly with hot topics people are searching for, it also allows you to claim your blog and tag it with search terms that make it easier for people to find you.

Tag your blog in Technorati both under your blog's profile and in the favorites section, which allows you to put in tons of tags.

Also tag it each of the blog postings. If you notice at the end of most of my blog entries, there are tiny tags there. Technorati provides you the HTML code to place not only in your blog template, but also in each post related to the tags, which I found is helpful for people to find them. The new Blogger Beta, which I use now, allows you to also label each post within their software.

Make sure to separate and combine tag terms. For example, I tagged my blog posting about my AC article titled Pregnant Woman Who Shot Herself in Stomach and Killed Baby is Acquitted not only with the combined "Circuit Court Judge Westbrook" tag, but with "circuit" "court" "judge" "westbrook" as individual tags, because Technorati combines the search terms so that no matter what ordered they were typed in, and no matter how many additional or fewer words were typed, people can still find the article.

Misspell Some Tags
This is the number one reason I love Google so much, and probably what helps to make it so successful. It's your very own spell-checking search engine!

Type in "asscited cntent" into Google and it politely asks, "Did you mean Associated Content?"

The reason it does this is because there are folks slaving away, typing in all the incorrectly spelled search terms that our spell-check-spoiled society types in, and tries to figure out what we really mean.

If you're up for it, throw in a few "comonly mispelled" words related to your tags so that you can catch all the traffic of the poor spellers, too.

Write a Lot
Humor writer Dave Barry has been asked how he became so prolific. True to his funny form, he answered plainly that he writes a lot. Writing a bunch of articles on varied and interesting topics gives varied and interesting readers more reasons to find your work, and helps you to build a helpful library of work that will keep them coming back.